Abstract

Sallust’s account of Catiline’s first speech contains a verbal echo of Cicero’s First Catilinarian. By raising the question of whether Catiline or Cicero counts as the author of the phrase, Sallust invites attention to the double nature of historiography as at once a literary representation of reality and a part of the historical processes it documents. Hearing Catiline as author points up the historicity of texts: the phrase itself changes meaning and significance as it is appropriated by a sequence of authors. An awareness of Cicero as source recalls the textuality of history: the struggles to control the meaning of actions and language staged through intertextuality overlap with actual political conflicts.